Crypto Critics Ignite After EOS Blockchain 'Freeze'
You may have missed it, but over the weekend, transactions on the live EOS blockchain came to a complete – yet temporary – halt.
Coming less than 48 hours after the much-anticipated blockchain network went live, the announcement kicked off a social firestorm (not to mention a reported 5 percent drop in the value of the network's cryptocurrency).
Some background: the EOS launch, reported last week by CoinDesk, came at the end of a topsy-turvy period illustrated by last-minute code tweaks, an elaborate election of entities tasked with creating the network's transaction blocks, and, of course, the $4 billion EOS token sale.
So, it came as a surprise to some that the network would run into enough trouble that it triggered a failsafe network freeze. And unsurprisingly, critics of EOS were quick to pounce.
However, in the fast-moving world of crypto, there was already damage done to the network's reputation.
That's not to say that EOS didn't have any commentators – or outright supporters – going to bat for it during the weekend debate. From a more supportive perspective, the weekend stoppage was seen largely as a growing pain and a symptom of a network controlled by no single entity, still getting its bearings so soon after...
Prominent KPMG Strategist Joins XinFin Hybrid Blockchain for Global Trade and Finance
S.V. Sukumar, formerly of KPMG, (head of strategy and operation consulting) is now with XinFin. Here’s the press release. Here’s the XinFin white paper. XinFin is an open source hybrid blockchain protocol. Its goal is to “help address the inefficiencies that exist in the global trade and finance markets today.”
What inefficiencies? Chiefly those that result from the inabilities of micro, small, and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs) to avail themselves of the financing that is available to the top end of the range of enterprises. Its prime use business cases include wallets, financial applications for cross-border payments, remittance sale, and so forth.
The white paper also observes that “across southeast Asia and the Pacific region, more than 120 million MSMEs, including both formal and informal ones, are unserved or underserved in terms of credit facilities.”
Sukumar is welcome aboard into a world where thinking big, on that scale, is taken for granted. The press release says that he’ll be responsible for “demystifying the underlying advantages to create concrete awareness.” That sounds like a bit of a concession that there is something mystifying about XinFin’s business plans in his absence. The best of luck to them, though, and to their new arrival.
Blockchain in the world of cloud storage
Use cases for blockchain for Cloud Storage
I remember back in the day when cloud gaming would be the future. That may have never taken off, but its predecessor cloud storage stuck around. Today we will take a look at cloud storage, and how blockchain is making its way into it.
How can blockchain be used in cloud storage?
Cloud storage is centralized, meaning that all of the data is stored somewhere by a third party that is accessible to everyone with the correct credentials. The problem with this is that data breaches and service interruption happen quite often, whether is it the host or the users' fault.
Blockchain wants to put an end to this. They still want you to use the cloud, but want to make it save to data breaches. This can be achieved because Blockchain is decentralized, it’s data is saved...